Children Helpline members on Friday educated Mysoreans about children rights and issues haunting them through street play as part of International Child Helpline Day celebrated on May 17.

They told the public that child marriage, employing child for work and child trafficking all attracts penal action. Children, especially street children and orphans, are at risk and they need your (Public) help.

Through plays, the helpline members conveyed the message that children, who are the future of India, require public support to stop crime against young citizens. Public may call the helpline number (1098/2453022) to save such children from danger.

There is a multitude of chocolate products on the market: ice cream, cookies, hot chocolate or dark chocolate. But all these sweet chocolate delights require the hard work of more than 1.5 million farmers, mostly from the Ivory Coast and Ghana, who grow and then harvest cocoa beans. Ivory Coast and Ghana are the two countries that produce more than half the world’s cocoa beans.

But this type of work has led to an increase in child trafficking and extremely difficult working conditions. According to a report released by Oxfam International, in 2009, along with Ivory Coast and Ghana, other countries which have similar problems are Indonesia, Ecuador and Cameroon.

Women, especially, get the worst paid jobs and they are harassed. “Most cocoa producers have never tasted chocolate,” write the authors of a report published in 2009.

The situation began to attract attention of chocolate lovers in the developed world. Big companies are starting to develop programs in this regard, Nestle and Mars already announced they will get involved in improving the working conditions of women in this industry. According to the same report, both companies have seen worrying statistics about the attention they give to these problems.

On Friday Night the Lifetime Network aired a two-hour America’s Most Wanted special on Sex Trafficking in America. For those who missed the episode, below are some highlights of a very moving, relevant, and compelling episode.

The show featured actual sex trafficking victims and their painful stories. Although the way in which these individuals were forced into the sex trafficking trade differed, one sobering thought was clear after hearing all of their stories; sex trafficking can happen to anyone.

One young girl who was being abused by her grandfather “met” a man on a social networking site. He promised her that he understood her pain and offered to fly her out for a visit. She was tricked and then forced into becoming a sex slave from then on until she managed to runaway one day.

A 14-year-old girl from Mexico was lured into the sex trafficking trade based on a lie that she was being taken to the U.S. for a job at a restaurant in Texas. Her “pimps” were not stern on birth control, which meant her “Johns” would impregnate her and the pimp held her responsible for her own abortions.

“There were 11 of us, and my father really tried hard to provide for us, but we lived in really strict poverty,” Begum said.

Then came a rich man, Stefan Chapman Christopher, who found her father, built him a house, and said he could take the kids and give them an education.

“So what parent would say no to that?” Begum said.

Her father gave up his children for their chance in the land of opportunity.

“So my journey from Bangladesh: we’re excited, we’re going to come to America, get on a plane, never ridden in a car before, all these exciting things,” Begum said. “Well, what was supposed to be a dream come true was my nightmare when I was brought to Oakville, Washington, with nine of my family members.”

She was 4 years old. She had an 11-year-old sister that was forced to marry the man.

“We were tortured,” Begum said. “We lived in a farm, this man ran a farm, used us all as slaves, for quite a few years. Not only were we forced to get up and work all day and night, no electricity, hardly any food … now it’s a very rural area, it’s safe, people go where they need to go, they come home and they bury their head in their own mind and their own business and their own home.”

Begum and her siblings were tortured, beaten, raped and emotionally abused.

“We were scared to go anywhere and look at people in the eye,” she said.

Begum and her family were saved when her 14-year-old cousin committed suicide. That’s when law enforcement got involved.

“Many of you have children; can you imagine? A 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-year-old, 12-year-old being raped and beaten,” Begum.

SABC television news reported that Colonel Vincent Mdunge said 16 girls were rescued from the building in the Point area in Durban, eight of them minors.

Some of the girls were as young as 12-years-old and some were under the influence of drugs.

“We are aware that the girls were captured in different parts of the country and were in transit in Durban. From there they are dispatched to different countries where they are sold for different reasons,” Mdunge told the public broadcaster.

A Chinese teenage sex slave who was kept in a cage in the UK did not know which country she was in when police found her, it was revealed Wednesday.

The 18-year-old was rescued from a locked cage inside a brothel in Birmingham, central England, and was put in the care of local nun Sister Helen Ryan and her order at St Mary’s Convent of Mercy.

Sister Ryan highlighted the young woman’s plight to draw attention to the problem of sex trafficking in Britain, the Birmingham Mail reported.

She told the paper, “One young boy was put in the back of a lorry [truck] by his granddad in Vietnam in the hope that he would get a better life. He was 13 years old and when he arrived in the West Midlands he was forced to work in the sex industry.”

“A man made me fall in love with him in Mexico. I was in love with him. I loved him very much because he was my first boyfriend,” she said through a translator.

Three years ago that boyfriend, a man twice her age, smuggled the then 16-year-old from Mexico to a home in Houston. He told her dreams come true here. But in Houston her nightmare began.

“I would cry out of desperation,” she said.

Maria’s so called boyfriend put her to work almost immediately as a sex slave at apartment complexes and inside cantinas. It happened she says:

“Everyday, six to seven days a week. Depending on the day I’d have sex with seven to ten men a night during the week and on weekends 20 to 30 men a night.”

Maria earned up to $5,000 a week.

She says she got to keep nothing.

“It used to be a daily routine. When I woke up he was always there. He would take me to work in the afternoon, and he would pick me up from work. It was always the same. The day I was off I would spend it with him.”

At night Maria dreamt of running away, but the climate of fear was enough to keep her mentally tied down.

“He used to tell me he was going to beat me up if I would talk including that I could not call Mexico because he was always there checking up on me, and sometimes he really beat me up.”

CNN’s Natalie Allen went to Vietnam on a trip to build a playground for poor children in the Mekong Delta. What she found, and shot with her own camera, was a community so poor and so vulnerable that it had become easy prey to child traffickers.

Airing for the first time on News Stream (2100 HKT) on Monday February 13, ‘The Children of the Dump’ is heartbreaking to watch – but it is not without hope. We’ll introduce you to one woman on a mission to save this community, as she puts it, “one girl at a time.”

Like this:

A retired justice ministry officer in Laos has been hauled up for questioning after he “adopted” newborn babies from hospitals and poor rural households and allegedly sold them—mostly to Americans, Canadians, and Australians, according to government officials.

The officer, who obtained adoption papers from the justice and foreign affairs ministries for babies that had been taken away from their parents, is accused of selling the infants—all one to two years old—for U.S. $1,500 to $5,000 each.

“What he did for adoption was legal, but selling babies was [illegal],” a Lao national security official investigating the case told RFA, saying the retired officer had been taken in for interrogations.

“He is the one who goes around hospitals and poor rural homes to locate unwanted babies and takes them to be sold later,” the official said.

It is not know how many babies have been linked to the trade but Laos has gained notoriety in recent years for human trafficking.

The study was initiated with twin aims: improving understanding of child trafficking and responses in the region; and contributing to the international discourse on child trafficking by examining the linkages between anti-trafficking responses and child protection systems. Although the study was conceived with a primary focus on trafficking, its scope is much broader. It analyses how the general principles of the Convention of the Rights of the Child are applied in relation to those children vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of exploitation. The study confirms that the Nordic countries have indeed made significant – and continuously evolving – attempts to address the issue of child trafficking, including through setting up relevant institutions, developing action plans and allocating budgets. However, while this has meant that specialized expertise is available for specific groups of children, it has sometimes also led to fragmentation of services, leaving some children unprotected. The research also finds that many existing gaps may be bridged by consistent and strengthened implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. At the same time, the study highlights that there is a way to achieve a fuller realization of rights for children who are vulnerable in the context of migration